Reclaim
Guides › Mileage
Recording your mileage
The four methods
Settings, then How trips start. Each option describes itself on that screen, next to the others, so you can compare them at the moment of choosing.
- Smart. Records every drive, and flags any your phone was not plugged in for so you can check it was really a car journey. This is the recommended setting and the one to pick if you are not sure.
- When I drive. Records every drive and never mentions the cable. Best if you rarely charge in the car.
- Plug and Go. Records only while your phone is charging. Plugging in becomes how you tell the app that a journey counts.
- Only when I start it. Nothing records until you tap Start.
Plug and Go is the only method that can lose a real journey. A drive you did not plug in for is not recorded at all, not even as a trip you can check later. That is the trade it makes in exchange for never recording anything you did not mean it to. If you would rather never miss one, use Smart, which records everything and tells you which drives were unplugged.
What automatic tracking needs
Location access has to be set to Always. Anything less and your phone stops handing journeys to Reclaim the moment the screen locks and the app goes into your pocket, which looks exactly like the app being broken.
Settings, then Tracking configuration, checks everything tracking depends on in one place and tells you what is missing and how to fix it. It is the first thing to open if drives are not appearing.
Only track during working hours
A tracking schedule stops trips starting outside the days and hours you work. Your weekends stay your own, and nothing about your evenings is recorded in the first place. Night shifts are handled properly: a window that runs from 22:00 to 06:00 belongs to the day it starts on.
The schedule gates the start of a trip only. A drive that begins at 17:55 inside a window that ends at 18:00 runs to its natural end. Cutting it at the boundary would turn one journey into two half-trips and under-claim the distance.
When a trip ends
A trip closes after about five minutes parked. Sitting in traffic does not end it: a crawl is still movement, and even at a dead standstill Reclaim can tell you are still in a vehicle and waits considerably longer before deciding the journey is over.
A stop that is long enough does end a trip, so a job with a wait in the middle can arrive as two. The Inbox offers to join them back together when that happens.
Battery
Background location costs power. There is no way around that, and any app claiming otherwise is not recording your mileage.
If battery life matters more to you than catching every drive, Plug and Go only runs while you are charging, which costs you nothing at all. Manual recording runs only between your tapping Start and Stop.
Still stuck? Ask us, or use Help inside the app.